No Statement Gets a Free Ride

Logic is philosophical and relevant to daily life, even moment to moment.

"The ultimate standards of logical correctness are merely the everyday uses of ordinary language."

Is THAT statement merely an everyday use of ordinary language? If so, how can it even talk about ultimate objects used as universal criteria of truth? It's just language used a certain way, right?

You can often spot a grandiose self-referencing contradiction in its use of the word "merely".

Why would anyone, whose statements and thoughts are merely a way of using language, want to make statements about ultimate standards or criteria of anything?

The actual logical uses of ordinary speech are most obvious in the fact that ordinary conversation is what produced things like symbolic logic and even logic itself. And there are philosophical reasons for using ordinary speech in these ways.

Some say the way we use language is just accidental and has no philosophical intelligibility. But how then can language be used for such practical and theoretic efficiencies as intended goals and the construction of a system of philosophical concepts and terms?

What is properly or uniquely philosophical in being logical? What value is there in knowing logical techniques and procedures?

This line of questioning can be answered only by knowing something about the philosophical grounds and the importance of logical tools and techniques.

Constructing, analysing, and changing systems of thought is itself pre-theoretic, used much like breathing prior to any philosophical reflection.

Logical forms are about things, pertain to things, predicate something about some object, and that's why they're the natural tools for knowing things.

But how do logical forms intend?

Underlying all artificial languages is the necessary natural intuitive logic or common sense which is designed not just for scientists, scholars, technicians, and other specialists but for anyone who wants to understand reality.

Logic is the universal mind-tool correlated to an actual world. And even if one believes the world to be illusory, that illusion has to be treated as an actual world. And all issues remain.

Superficial Plausibilities

Philosophy is my more or less intuitive sense of what life really means to me. Intuition comes before analysis anyway. It's the first step toward thinking about the meaning of life.

That's why we have to learn definitions, for example. They're not already there for all we encounter.

What is true about this universe I'm in? What should I do? What do I want? What do I expect? What is my final destiny? Is immortality possible? Would this life affect any possible future one I might have? Why is everything a struggle, including the struggle to think through these questions? What am I, anyway? What does all this mean?

It's easier to come up with superficially plausible answers to these kinds of questions than it is to discover answers based on convincing reasons from organized analysis. But only post-experience reflection uses evidence and possible answers to fill in an already-existing system.

No limited mind has the complete structure. For that reason, my thought is episodic, uneven, and disconnected. So to develop my thought, I must attack it comprehensively so that it will include a more complete integral system of compared possibilities.

Fun With Devolution

"Humanity would rather do for itself what is right in the moment than consider the wider consequences of its behavior.

I feel like the cow who runs into the field screaming, 'Hey, you know that truck that takes some of our friends away every month? Well, they don't take them to another field like we thought. They shoot them in the head, bleed them dry, cut them up, and put the pieces into packets. Then those humans buy them and eat them!' Imagine what the reaction of the rest of the herd would be: 'You're crazy, man. They'd never do that. Anyway, I've got shares in that trucking company and I get a good return.'"

--David Icke

The Unsung God of Supervisory Assumptions

What could possibly obligate me when the discussion of obligation itself is ruled by already-assumed statements which have no obligation issue because they are necessarily used to talk about the idea of obligation?

Is there anything that really obligates belief in something? Is it merely a prior committment to act according to a set of rules? Do we have a built-in prior commitment or bias to think and act in a certain way while rejecting all other ways, however provisional that bias might be in principle? Belief in obligating factors of mind, for example.

Why is any question an appropriate object of thought? And what are the irreducible statements assumed in order to know what a question is?

Is there a set of statements that rule all thought without exception? How do we live in relation to them? And would that imply anything about their role in how we are defined as an object that questions? What exactly am I, in asking or thinking about a question, other than being merely a question-asking object?

And are all my actions carried out based on an already believed-in hierarchy of universalized values?

Wild West Collectivism

A group is incapable of either reason or trust.

--Paladin

Quantum Mind Factor

Let x be whatever you want.

I want to know whether or not x is the solution.

If x has been discovered to rectify the past, reverse entropy, and eliminate death, then my knowledge of x and how to act in relation to knowing that x is the solution, may imply that x could extend my existence indefinitely in a universe where only the good would thereafter be renderable in a progressive, even exponential, synthesis of the feeling of well-being.

To claim that there is no solution assumes a single solution---mere denial, because it resolutely pertains to the problem, a substitute solution, however heuristically it functions.

Usually with the insinuation that it should not be discussed any more. But that's another story.

The discussion of this possibility is based on a set of assumptions that are necessary to think thoughts and make statements---even statements about those statements themselves.

To talk about whether universally and exceptionlessly true statements are possible already assumes a set of ultimate thoughts to be universally and exceptionlessly true rules about how we must or ought to think about universals, obligations that the mind 'must' or 'ought' or 'should' refer to and depend on as one shows or even states the denial of universals.

Sorry, no free ride for the casually dismissive. The tell-tale heart arbitrarily balks here, and will not go another logical step beyond this point.

Unfortunately, it has all those mere claims just bandied about as somehow saving one from something. They either stand by themselves in some kind of anti-intellectual posturing, or else retreat into the same kinds of justifications it rejected in all arguments to the contrary.

Now that you're rid of God, welcome to the mind god that just won't go away.

No Rest for the Idle

Only an idle person does not know what it means to enjoy rest.

--Paladin
"Have Gun Will Travel"